First of all, thank you. To be the the bedroom of a teenage girl is something sacred, for you are where I grew up, broke down, and rose again. You housed my late nights and early mornings. Cliché as it may be, you were the bedroom I’d imagined since I was a young girl sprawled on the couch watching sitcoms. I’d seen the girls on TV spending late nights on the phone with boys, running away and slamming the door behind them, painting their friends’ nails, crying to their mothers, and solving their minuscule, adolescent problems in their bedrooms. And while I knew it was all an image conceived in some writer’s brain, I wanted that more than anything. And you gave it to me.

You were not marvelous enough to be the bedroom people take portraits of and boast about, but you were mine, and that alone is reason enough to bear your image in my mind forever. My bed, queen-sized and plush, lay against one wall as my posters latticed your walls and were replaced as I outgrew their depictions. My tiny desk with its single drawer entertained late nights devoted to studying for exams that I thought would define the rest of my life, but never counted for anything. Clothes, both clean and dirty, were strewn across your floor in a maze-like fashion, and somehow, I always managed to do away with the disarray come laundry day. I was never satisfied with the color scheme I assigned you many years ago, for I chose it on a whim at a much younger age and have since retracted my taste to wall coverings that are not bright pink. To compensate for my distaste, I took up today’s decorating trends accordingly: a record player, posters, Christmas lights, tapestries, more posters, salt lamps, and minimalist art prints that I ordered online and paid more than a tank of gas for.

Within your walls lie pages of memories only you and I know of. If your walls could talk, surely you could recount everything you bore witness to. The friends who slept over then came and went. The fights with my mother. The hasty cleanup of nail polish remover. The Sunday mornings when I promised myself I wouldn’t leave my bed, yet always did so reluctantly. The nights I laid awake pouring out love to my first boyfriend over the phone like it was nothing, then the night I spent crying on the floor when he made that last phone call to end everything. The experiments I ran on my face with makeup. The essays and study guides composed for futile exams that never mattered much. The screams into pillows when I couldn’t handle adolescence anymore. The prom dresses displayed for months before the big day when I felt beautiful beyond my wildest dreams. The loud music accompanied by wild, terrible dancing. The bad dreams and night terrors. The drunken nights I spent with friends and hid from my parents. The poems preaching of an easy way out that I read aloud like there was an answer in their couplets. The first dates I prepared for, then never followed up with. The clear, raw emotion of being a teenage girl, all bottled up in four walls.

These were not my glory years, this I know to be true. Now that I am grown, life has only gotten better, and will continue to grow. I will find new bedrooms, in dormitories and apartments and houses I’ll someday own. But none of them will see me in the way you did. My adolescent beauty is embedded in that thin layer of pink paint that will be covered sooner or later; my acquired strength has solidified your framework. Perhaps you will become someone else’s place of growth, but you were mine first. Every time I think of you, this will be the picture in my mind: our montage of the good, the bad, and the ugly in which I play the lead. And while everything, even you, has come and gone in time, this is what I will carry. The time I lived here, and the lifetime you prepared me for.